In this guide, we will be having a look at some of the plausible workarounds to disable the automatic unit conversions in the Text Edit app on your Mac. Text Edit is a great app when it comes to jotting down quick notes that don’t require any formatting or styling as such. However, for some reason, the OS decides it’s best to add a little bit of extra functionality to it, even if users haven’t asked for it in the first place.
One such feature is the automatic unit conversion. For the unaware, if you type in a unit like 19cm and then hit a space, it will automatically do the conversion and type in the value 7.49 inch. First off, we never asked it to do this conversion and secondly, how did it decide that we wanted the conversion to be done to inches and not mm or meter?
Making matters worse is the fact that this issue is present across other Apple writing apps as well, such as Pages, and Notes. So if you are infuriated with this behavior of the app, then this guide will make you aware of some handy workarounds that might help you put an end to this fiasco. Follow along.
Table of Contents
How to Disable Automatic Unit Conversions in Text Edit on Mac
It is recommended that you try out each of the below-mentioned workarounds and then see which one spells out success. So with that in mind, let’s get started.
FIX 1: Use Space + Option
Your first course of action should be to use the Space+option key combination instead of just the Space key. This will add the space without doing the conversion.
FIX 2: Second time’s the charm
This is rather strange but the conversion only seems to happen for the first time. If you re-write that same word, then the app will not do the conversion and will print it exactly what you need. So consider deleting your word nd then retyping it and you’ll no longer auto-conversion.
FIX 3: Disable “Text replacement”
You can also try disabling the Text Replacement feature from Edit > Substitutions > Uncheck Text Replacement and see if it works out for you.
FIX 4: Turn off Data Detectors
Along the same lines, turning off the Data Detectors might as well get the job done, if it is enabled. [Do so from Edit > Substitutions > Uncheck Data Detectors].
FIX 5: Turn off Apple Intelligence
While I personally faced this issue even before AI made its presence felt, a bunch of users have said that turning off AI did infact address this bug. So do give it a try from System Settings > Apple Intelligence & Siri > Turn off Apple Intelligence > and check out the results.
FIX 6: Disable Keyboard Text Replacement
Apart from disabling the Text Replacement for Text Edit, you should also consider doing so for the keyboard app in general. This could be done from: System Settings > Preferences > Keyboard > Text Replacement.
FIX 7: Use Third-Party Apps
If none of the aforementioned tweaks worked in your favor, then your last course of action should be to try a third-party text editor app like BBEdit, Tot, Sublime Text 3, Ulysses, Things, and Mimestream.
That’s it. These were the various methods that should help you disable the automatic unit conversions in the Text Edit app on your Mac. If you have any queries concerning the aforementioned steps, do let us know in the comments. We will get back to you with a solution as soon as possible.
